Book Review: Cautionary Tales by Emmanuelle de Maupassant

After you've read something, please consider leaving a line or two on Goodreads and Amazon. The authors appreciate it!

Here's my review as it appears on Goodreads.

Cautionary Tales: Voices from the Edges by Emmanuelle de Maupassant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If these stories were a movie, you would find that the old woman telling the tales is either one of the young, buxom protagonist of one of the stories, or one of the spirits that interjects throughout the narrative. And she would likely unwrap her babushka from her head and frighten you with some hideous demon feature. This isn’t a spoiler in any way, simply the image that came into my head as I was reading.

These are fairy tales that will keep you up at night, partly out of fear as you wonder if the spirits are watching your every action, partly due to the erotic voyeurism of watching others make mistakes. The reader follows the spirits as they show us the errors of many human ways. Lust and greed lead people down many paths and some people pay for their actions as a way to teach others not to follow them.

Cautionary Tales is quite different from de Maupassant’s novel, The Gentlemen’s Club, but equally rich in language that draws the reader into a frightening, lustful, and delightful experience.


View all my reviews

The Problem with Parenting Magazines

When I was pregnant a friend gave me some advice: Never read parenting magazines. “You’ll get put on the mailing list,” she said. “’With our complements,’ the card will tell you. Take the time to throw out the magazines and remove yourself from their mailing list. I promise this is one of the best things you can do as a parent.”

For the most part I followed that advice. I even threw out What to Expect by the time Muffin was three months old because she wasn’t following any of the directions the handbook gave and it stressed me out. Recently, though, I saw this headline, “Am I Supposed to Be My Child’s Playmate?”, from Parenting magazine. The mother of all magazines I try to avoid.

I am no expert in parenting, other than keeping my own child relatively happy and healthy for the last five years, but like most parents, regardless of my feelings on the topic, I’m going to click on a lot of parenting articles. Personally, I think it’s fine to find a balance between playing with children and giving them time and space to play on their own.

The very first paragraph made me uneasy. The author’s mother would make dinner for the family on the one night a week she wasn’t home for dinner because she had a graduate school class. Okay, that’s fine. But her father would throw away the pot roast, hiding it deep in the garbage can, order pizza, and hide the boxes in a neighbor’s garbage so that the mother would never find out. “It was our little secret,” the author says.

That is a terrible secret. Her parents were so held down by traditional parenting roles that her mother could not say to her father, “You are responsible for dinner this one night a week.” Nor could the father say, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of dinner this one night a week.” She felt the need to make a dinner that her family would throw away. (Why throw it away? Why not carve it up for sandwiches or save it for another night?) I would be pissed if I found out my spouse and child were doing this after the trouble I went through to make the meal.

I realized as I read that this article taps into the insecurity many mothers feel about being Mean Mommy versus Fun Dad. I haunt parenting groups to see what other parents are up to and I see the Mean Mommy issues brought up by women all the time. Mothers are meant to nurture and be caregivers for their families. Fathers are meant to be playmates.

I call shenanigans.

Both parents are parents. Fathers are not playmates or baby-sitters. (More men are professional chefs but more women are still expected to cook for their families? Don’t even get me started on that… Maybe a future blog post.) Both parents can play to their strengths, of course, but at some time they are going to have to step up to both roles.

That is, if both parents are present and if they are a heterosexual couple.

There’s no reason why, if both parents are present, then they can’t share the nurturing and the playmate parts. Single parents have to do both. Same-sex parents take on both roles. There’s absolutely no need for it to be gender divided, or divided at all. So many parenting articles reinforce these gender roles without taking into account that families are not as nuclear as they were a generation or two ago, nor with taking into account the different personalities and strengths that different parents have. They continue to reinforce the image of the ideal superwoman who can keep a perfect household and hold down a career or further her education while dad occasionally baby-sits.

Families aren’t like that anymore and many media outlets continue to subversively keep that out-dated model alive.

And that's why I don't read parenting magazines. Really, I don't.

The Importance of Apple Pie in Running

Recently Facebook reminded me that about two years ago my friend Running While Mommy shared this article with me, The REAL Best Foods for Runners, with the note that number eight reminded her of me. Apple pie. I'd had apple pie for breakfast one morning before we ran a ten miler together. And I was just fine. I ran the miles at a decent pace and I didn't get sick.

I thought of saying here, “I wouldn’t recommend this breakfast for every long run,” but I won’t. It’s none of my business if you eat apple pie for breakfast. You (hopefully) know your body better than I do.

I love reading about sports nutrition. I devour cookbooks, articles, research. But I can’t bring myself to follow all the advice, all the meal plans, all the tips about how to increase kale in my diet. I’ve tried that. I’ve monitored, written down, and analyzed every bite. I’ve counted my servings, measuring them on a kitchen scale. I’ve kept food journals.

It’s frickin’ exhausting. It takes the fun out of eating. And it takes up time I'd rather spend sleeping.

I’m forty and I’ve been running since I was fifteen. I’ve learned what works for me and what doesn’t. I’m willing to try new things but I love my old habits. I know that after a run of ten miles or longer, my favorite enchilada platter and a margarita will be waiting for me at the neighborhood Mexican restaurant. I stick with my old-school lemon-lime Gatorade for exceptionally long runs in warm weather. I'll take real chocolate milk, thank you very much, rather than a shake with chocolate-flavored protein powder.

My attention turns to food now for two reasons. One, I've put on a few pounds from winter comfort food and while I am in no way dieting, I am cutting back on my portions of chocolate and potato chips. But, two, as I've announced on Twitter and Facebook already, I'll be running my first marathon this this fall and it will take a lot of food and miles to get me to the starting line.

I entered the lottery for the Marine Corps Marathon and I got in. So you can expect more running posts from me here as my training gets underway. You all know I don't count calories and blog every bite. You know I don't track every mile, every mile split, publicly on this blog, and I won't start now. But I will increase the number of my posts about running as I get into training and need a platform to hold myself accountable.

I started planning to run this marathon last October when I was reading about other friends and acquaintances running it. I already knew we'd be coming back to the United States in 2016 so I made it my goal to run it as a "Welcome Home" event. Sure, I came home several months sooner than planned, but this is still my year of being back home. I'm excited for the race.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a huge ball of fresh mozzarella in the fridge with my name on it. And I need to make an apple pie for this week's long run.